The contributors to Metaphor and Discourse present a collection of work on the functioning of metaphor in public discourse and related discourse areas from a broadly cognitive-linguistic background. Discourse scholars have for a long time been concerned with the methodological difficulties of identifying, annotating, and analysing metaphors, as well as with the complex relations between the embodiment of metaphorical thought on the one hand and the socio-cultural grounding of metaphorical communication on the other. A substantial body of work has grown out of these concerns over the last two decades. The present book provides a state-of-the-art overview of this lively research field, and furthermore contributes to debates in Cognitive Linguistics (and beyond) regarding tensions between conceptualist idealizations and empirically observable variation.